By ANDREA ROTHMAN, BLOOMBERG NEWS

Published 10:00 pm, Friday, July 16, 2004

TOULOUSE, France -- Lifting a curtain at a new Airbus SAS factory near here in May, Chief Executive Noel Forgeard unveiled a two-story aircraft with a 261-foot wingspan: "Our big baby," he told his 4,000 guests.

But it's bigger than the parent expected.

Six months before flight tests and less than a year before its first scheduled public flight in June 2005, the A380 is still overweight by as much as 4 metric tons, said Tim Clark, president of its biggest customer, Emirates, the Middle East's largest carrier.

Airbus has promised customers such as Singapore Airlines Ltd. that the 555-seat A380 will be 15 percent to 20 percent cheaper to operate than The Boeing Co.'s 747, carrying 35 percent more passengers and with a 10 percent greater range. If the A380 fails to make weight, Airbus would have to pay financial penalties, which could erode its lead over Boeing in the $50 billion-a-year commercial jet market.

"We have been told that there will be no compromise on the terms of the warranty," Clark said. "Otherwise it will be very expensive for them."

Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Inc., a San Diego consulting firm, figures that each ton of extra weight allows the plane to carry 12 fewer passengers, assuming an average weight of 175 pounds per person. Four tons, he said, could mean up to 50 fewer people. Airbus says it will give an update on the A380 and other aircraft at the U.K.'s Farnborough Air Show, which opens Monday.

"Because this plane has been sold on an efficiency basis, the impact of being overweight may be more significant for the success of the program than on other planes," said Jack Hansman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Any extra weight is payload you're not carrying."

Toulouse-based Airbus will face financial penalties if the plane exceeds its target of about 240 tons, missing performance goals, said Gerard Blanc, executive vice president for operations.

Airbus has sold 129 of the double-decker plane to Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and eight other customers. Forgeard said at the Berlin Air Show on May 11 that he had several other customers "in the pipeline" and will probably have at least one new order to announce at the Farnborough Air Show.

Emirates' Clark said the plane is about 1.7 percent above the 239-ton target at which Emirates ordered the plane. That weight is without cabin furnishings, fuel or passengers.

The difference prompts the expected response from Airbus' U.S. competitor.

Airbus can't deliver the efficiencies it has promised in range or payload, given its struggle to reduce the A380's weight, said Randy Baseler, vice president of marketing for commercial airplanes at Chicago-based Boeing. Boeing never found customers for proposed versions of a larger 747 that would have carried as many as 516 passengers.

"If the plane's heavier, it consumes more fuel," Baseler said. "That drives up landing and navigation fees, and also maintenance costs, especially for wheels, tires and brakes."

Boeing is now marketing its first new aircraft in 14 years, the Everett-built 7E7 Dreamliner -- which it calls a fuel-efficient, midsize plane carrying as many as 289 passengers -- to fight Airbus in the commercial aircraft market. Boeing Chief Executive Harry Stonecipher predicts that operating margins will widen to 10 percent from 8 percent at the company's commercial division, thanks partly to the 7E7.

"No aircraft program -- Boeing or Airbus, civil or military -- avoided going through weight difficulties," Airbus' Blanc said. "Anyone who says 'I have no weight problem' is somebody who lies."

He said Airbus is making continual adjustments to materials and some design elements. He declined to discuss specific numbers, saying the exact weight on any aircraft is a contractual issue between each airline and the manufacturer.

Airbus has been fighting to cut the plane's weight since it first committed to building the aircraft in December 2000. By early 2001, engineers had realized it was overweight, said Charles Champion, the program's director. Champion didn't offer figures.

Tecop's Weber said industry executives told him three years ago that the excess was 20 tons to 30 tons.

Airbus is using carbon-fiber composites for slimming the new jet, just as Boeing has indicated it will do to an even greater extent in the 7E7. Made from a petroleum-based product filled with epoxy resin, the materials are four times stronger than aluminum and weigh 40 percent less. About 25 percent of the A380 will be made of composites, up from 15 percent in the A340-600, which entered service in 2002, Airbus says.

Major A380 sections from composites will include the 12-ton center wing box, which links the left and right wings within the underbody of the fuselage; the rear-pressure bulkhead, a dome-shaped partition that divides the passenger cabin from the parts of the plane that aren't pressurized; the flight control surfaces such as the flaps, spoilers and ailerons; and most of the tail.

Even as the first A380s are being assembled, Airbus engineers are pushing to introduce changes to shave weight off each successive model.

For example, Glare, an aluminum-alloy-and-glass fiber sandwich, may have already cut at least a ton from the A380's final weight. Glare, short for "glass-reinforced," was developed in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s by Stokker Aviation NV. Airbus has tested its use on the German air force's existing A310 model to ensure that it holds up over time, Airbus's Champion said.